Manufacturing compromise
Chris Grier, Lucas Ballard, Juan Caballero, Neha Chachra, Christian Dietrich, Kirill Levchenko, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Damon McCoy, Antonio Nappa, Andreas Pitsillidis, Niels Provos, M. Zubair Rafique, Moheeb Abu Rajab, Christian Rossow, Kurt Thomas, Vern Paxson, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker · 2012
We investigate the emergence of the exploit-as-a-service model for driveby browser compromise. In this regime, attackers pay for an exploit kit or service to do the "dirty work" of exploiting a victim's browser, decoupling the complexities of browser and plugin vulnerabilities from the challenges of generating traffic to a website under the attacker's control. Upon a successful exploit, these kits load and execute a binary provided by the attacker, effectively transferring control of a victim's machine to the attacker.